…to get to the city council meeting, of course!  Did you happen to catch this story on the AP news wire a few weeks ago?  While Durango, Colorado’s city council was discussing their recent 3-2 vote which made it easier to keep backyard chickens, a person in a chicken costume ran into the meeting, circled and flapped, and then sat in the gallery.

Several minutes later, the unidentified chicken exited – after laying an egg on the floor.

No need to worry about disrupting business, however, the council found it humorous!

“I thought it was hilarious,” councilwoman Christina Thompson told The Durango Herald. “I was laughing so hard my eyes hurt. There are just so many other things for us to be serious about, it’s good to take a break once in a while.”

I, like everyone else, I’m sure, have questions.  Who was the anonymous chicken?  Was it a prank?  Were they there to show their support for the hen ordinance, or were they against it?  Was the egg hen-sized or was it larger, perhaps large enough to contain a message for the council?  What was inside that egg?!?

Family brawl erupts at children’s pizza place
Deborah Donovan | Daily Herald Staff
Contact writer

CHICAGO:
Arlington Heights police are investigating a “family ordeal that got out of hand” Sunday night at the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant, 955 W. Dundee Road.

According to Sgt. Tom Boggs, a family was apparently celebrating the birthday of a young man in his early teens when other members of the family showed up, and an argument began.

“There was a pushing match and things were thrown,” said Boggs.

One person was taken to Northwest Community Hospital with a cut below an eye and another person went to a clinic for a cut on a hand.

“We tried to talk to everybody there last night,” Boggs said. “It’s hard to say at this point whether there will be charges.”

Boggs said he believes some of the participants had been drinking. He is not sure how many people were involved, but officers talked with five or six Sunday night.

While the altercation created a mess in the restaurant, no physical damage was done there, the sergeant said.

Boggs said the people involved were from the Northwest suburbs.

The restaurant has pizza, arcade games, shows and other things that appeal to young children.  A woman who answered the phone Monday afternoon declined to comment on the record.

Probably a year ago now, I received one of those email forwards about getting to know your friends.  You know the type –  you read your friends’ answers to some strange and random questions and then you answer them, getting to know more about your friends and yourself.  One of the questions was something about choosing a fictional character that best describes your friend, and my friend wrote “Wonder Woman” about me.  I thought  that was awesome because I don’t feel like a wonder woman, but it’s fun that someone else thinks that about me, so it’s kind of stuck with me…  Especially in these recent days where I am one of the last ones in our family standing as the others are flu-stricken.  It’s been kind of a mantra I say to myself as I walk around our barren wastelands of a living room, tending the ailing…  “I am a wonder woman, I will not get the flu.”

If I were a sort of flu wonder woman, I would carry holsters for my tools of trade: bottle of disinfectant, antibacterial soap, hand sanitizer, Hall’s Defense lozenges, antibacterial wipes, tissues…  I’ve washed my hands raw in the past week.

This is all very strange, maybe the flu has infected my brain.  I’ve also taken on what seem like really weird habits lately, like swallowing garlic cloves and onion petals like pills with my dinner.  I’m not going to say anything about how I smell lately, but hey, I’m one of the last ones around here who hasn’t gotten sick.  So far, our two youngest kids and myself remain healthy.  I  can’t believe we haven’t gotten it, and it feels strange to live life feeling like a sitting duck.  This thing is so nasty and contagious, it’s really only a matter of time…

Our oldest daughter came home last Friday night and stayed in bed until Tuesday when she also finally starting talking and eating again.  Our second oldest daughter had a bad fever Tuesday and slept for awhile and then she was fine.  My husband has felt terrible for 3 days now.  It’s affecting everyone differently, and it’s completely unpredictable.  I had to go into the middle school to get my daughter’s homework, and that’s where I found out that half the 4th grade came down with it Friday night.  I also learned of the “8 day” theory – some people have thought that their families were sick and over it, only to have other members of the household come down with it 8 days later.  Sounds like a horror movie, feels like a sci-fi movie.  Pretty much everyone I know who has kids has H1N1 in their families.  I’m especially worried about our friends whose diabetic daughter was sent home from school with a blood sugar reading of over 300.  Her mother also has a chronic illness and her medication includes steroids, so both of them are high risk for H1N1 complications.

We had a busy week planned this week and had to cancel most obligations.  It’s really difficult to live our busy lives without being able to commit to anything, not knowing whether we’ll be sick or healthy.  I hope everyone else is doing ok…  is the outbreak especially bad in our small community, or is this just the reality of the 2009 flu outbreak?  I am a wonder woman, I will not get the flu…

So what’s that tickle in my throat?

Like in a newspaper’s picture caption.  Many locals make fun of our county’s newspaper; pointing out miscellaneous typos, erroneous information and errors, but today’s typo in the following picture caption is kind of a big oopsie:

The line for the H1N1 virus snakes through the parking lot at the County Fairgrounds
Wednesday afternoon.

Obviously our county does not have people lining up to get the H1N1 virus; the replacement word here in case you’ve fallen asleep is vaccine.  The line for the H1N1 vaccine snakes through…
Now that would be one nasty small-town rumor!

Often I write about laws and regulations that are intended to help parents decide what is right for their child because sometimes these laws overstep boundaries.  There was a story a while ago about a woman who was arrested for leaving her sleeping toddler in the car while she walked with her other daughter to donate change to a Salvation Army bell-ringer less than 50 feet away.  I, like many others, couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps the police overstepped their boundaries in that case –  it was probably traumatic for all those kids to have to watch their mother getting taken away by the police in handcuffs.  I wish that parents nowadays could just be trusted to do what is best for their children – but then there are people like this woman from Alabama:

ALBERTVILLE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama woman has been charged with endangering the welfare of a child after police say she let her daughter ride in a cardboard box on top of their van. Albertville Police spokesman Sgt. Jamie Smith said the 37-year-old woman was arrested Sunday after police received a call about a minivan on a state highway with a child riding on top.

The 13-year-old daughter wasn’t harmed and was turned over to a relative. A jail worker said the mother was out on bond Monday.

Thank goodness the child was not physically hurt.

I’ve blogged about the Duggar family before – they are famous for having a TLC reality show about their large family of 20.  That’s two parents and eighteen natural offspring – no adoptees, no foster kids; just two people who don’t believe in birth control and who have the utmost faith in God and their marriage.  I blogged about their daily routine (involving a cool-looking, specially outfitted custom-built house for a large family – think industrial size kitchen appliances and 4 washer / dryer sets) that seems to be successful in keeping their 20-member household functioning smoothly.  I also linked to their website, which had pictures of the interior of  their custom-made house.  They had their own buffet line built into one of the kitchens, and their dining room has a drink station with cups for each of the 18 kids.  As a parent of 4, I find their larger family way of life fascinating.  Actually, some of their practices have changed since the eldest Duggar offspring is now moved out, married, and expecting a baby of his own.

Not to be outdone, his mother Michelle is pregnant with  her nineteenth child.  She says she took this latest pregnancy test “on a whim”, which is difficult for me to comprehend when she’s had probably around a dozen and half positive pregnancy tests in her life.  She said she was nursing, and her infant grew fussy – in the past, a fussy nursing infant meant that mother’s milk had pregnancy hormones, so that’s why she took the test.  I can’t imagine having kids close enough in age to be able to find that out once, let alone to test it over and over like a theorem.  And another thought on this –  when Mrs. Duggar gives birth to child #19 (wonder what personality traits can  be attributed to #19 according to the psychologists who specialize in birth order?  Do the books go that high?), she will have spent roughly one-third of her 42 years on this Earth pregnant.  I hope for her sake she doesn’t go through a pregnancy withdrawl when her body is done having kids.  But for now, the family seems happy as can be, and what’s interesting is that Michelle’s first grandchild will be about 5 months older than his or her aunt or uncle.  And let it be clear that I’m not putting these people down – they have a solid family and all these kids seem well cared for by two loving parents who are still married, not to mention LOADS of siblings…  more power to them!

Because I have two kids in the local city school system at the same time, I receive double the school memos.  So while Friday’s after-school-folder-clean-out yielded the usual classwork, homework and doodles, there were also some notices clearly indicative of these times in which we’re living: a list of swine flu H1N1 symptoms and (what I thought at the time anyway)  to be a routine parental notice with optional exclusion form.  You know the type –  I would not like my son / daughter to participate in the following school activity (fill in the blank, field trip, sex ed, open lunch, etc.), signed (parent’s name). This time the form was in reference to an address by Barrack Obama, the President of the United States, to the students of the country.  When I  received the memo, I was all in favor.  I would not be one of the parents who declined my child the opportunity to be involved with current events and history in the making.  I thought it was great that the President was making an unprecedented, concentrated effort to make a positive influence on America’s youth.  But then I read CNN.com and the other news outlets, and I saw that some people seemed to be using this as a political soundboard, and I think it’s just sad that some people use everything our President does as a reason to bring up racial tension.

I would like to steer my blog from most politics, however, I am a parent of two kids who are in American public schools, so this is an issue that hits close to home.  So whether you watch the Obama student address or not, whether you approve of the President and/or his message to students, consider the significance of the Presidential address taking place this Tuesday, September 8, 2009 for what it is – history in the making.

Did you hear about this?  Seems a man settling back for a quiet afternoon in his tiki bar (that’s a whole ‘nother story, I guess.  Us Midwestern folks can’t really identify…) when he opened his can of Diet Pepsi, took a big gulp and began to gag.  His wife came over, and to make a long story short, found a blob in his pop can that was tested and discovered to be a gutted frog or toad.  For more of the gory details, click the link above, and you can find out how (and this is a direct quote from the frog-drinker’s wife), “what started out as a normal afternoon in our tiki bar has blown up into this crazy thing.”

I titled this post appropriately because while I love all animals, I’m scared of frogs and toads.  It’s a weird thing and I won’t go into it (more scared of the “ugly” harmless ones than the pretty poisonous ones, go figure), but the only thing I can think of worse than finding a gutted amphibian in my pop is to find a live one or even a dead one that still resembles its living form.  That being said, in all seriousness, my true greatest fear is something bad happening to my family, but I thought this made for interesting reading anyway.  I smell  a lawsuit.

See if you enjoy this as much as I did – a group of female gorillas is given posters of their prospective mate.  How did they react to it?  Read:

From cnn.com:
by Nick Hunt

So when three female gorillas at London Zoo heard that they would soon be visited by a brooding French hunk — well, they went a bit bananas.

The latest development in Anglo-French relations sees Yeboah, a 20-stone 12-year-old, leave his current home at La Boissiere Du Dore Zoo, Pays de la Loire, northwest France and head for the British capital by the end of the year.

There he will be greeted by gorilla trio Zaire, Effie and Mjukuu, who were given posters of their prospective boyfriend for the first time Thursday.

One female gorilla shrieked in delight, while another wedged the poster in a tree to stare at it.

A third, clearly overcome by emotion, held the photo close to her chest — then ate it.

Their reception was somewhat unsurprising. The zoo has been without a male gorilla since the demise of Bobby, a silverback, in December.

Tracey Lee, team leader at London Zoo, put in a good word for the hirsute lothario on the London Zoo Web site, saying Yeboah is “a very charming, fun loving and intelligent gorilla.”

But whom will Yeboah choose to charm first?

Zaire, at 34, is the oldest female gorilla and has been at London Zoo since 1984. The zoo says she’s “happiest when she’s taking down and rebuilding her nest in various spots around the island. She loves to play with fabric and often drags it around with her all day. “

Then there’s Effie, 16, who “enjoys seeing toddlers and often makes her way over to the glass when they come to see her,” according to the zoo Web site.

Finally there’s 10-year-old Mjukuu, or “Jookie.” Dan Simmonds, a keeper at the zoo’s Gorilla Kingdom, says she “has this ‘butter wouldn’t melt look’ to her, and she gets away with murder.”

“The other two females get along with her very well; she seems to have them all wrapped around her little finger.”

Above is a picture of the gorilla who hung up the picture of her new beau.

There’s really not much to say about the following article – someone did something extremely stupid, and I thought I’d share.  At least no one was seriously hurt…

CAR SET ABLAZE AFTER JOLIET WOMAN USED LIGHTER TO CHECK GAS CAN LEVEL
By Lee Filas | Daily Herald Staff

A 27-year-old Joliet woman is suffering from second-degree burns after using a lighter to check the fuel level in a gas can she was filling while the can was resting inside her car.

Police officials said the woman drove into a 7-11 gas station at 1609 E. Cass St. at about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday night and climbed out of her car.

She then placed the gas can on the passenger seat of the vehicle, pulled down the nozzle of the pump, and began filling the can.

About halfway through, the woman ignited a lighter to shine some light on the gas can, apparently to see how full the can was, officials said.

The can ignited from the lighter’s flame and exploded, setting the vehicle’s interior ablaze, officials said.

After the fire started, the woman pushed the car away from the gas pumps to apparently ensure the fire didn’t spread to the gas pumps itself.

Officials said, when police and fire officials arrived on the scene, the car was located about 5-feet from the pumps and was completely engulfed in flames.

The woman was transported from the scene to Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet with nonlife threatening injuries to her wrist and thigh, authorities said.

And is it any wonder why it doesn’t list the woman’s name?  I can’t decide if it’s a nice thing that the press spared her the humiliation or if they should have included her name so the rest of society can watch out for her!  I don’t really understand how someone could do something that dumb, and then turn around and remember to push the car out of the way so it didn’t ignite like the gas can!
Thank God there weren’t any kids in the car!